War Story

by Derek Robinson

  Already the nearest balloon was on its way down. The Germans had high-speed winches and well-trained crews: in the time it took Goss to arrive, the balloon would be on the ground. Gunfire was flashing and flickering all around the balloon site and the sky was dirty with a protective barrage. The FE wallowed through the fading, acrid remains of a shellburst and Goss turned steeply away. The gunners chased him. There was nothing to do but fly the plane up to the cloud cover, but all the way he could feel sweat coating the ribs under his arms.

  He flew north above the cloud for three minutes and circled for three minutes more to give them time to forget about him. Then he went straight down, as fast as he could. They had not forgotten about him. There was a balloon less than a mile off. He turned to it and frightened it but at the same time tracer began streaking up so he kept turning and saw the third balloon in the distance. Goss did a quick reckoning. He’d panicked two balloons and annoyed a mob of gunners To go for a third balloon would be reckless and idiotic. He felt reckless and lucky. He went for it. The winch crew began winding it down within twenty seconds. Goss laughed aloud. It was like driving fat cattle: you shouted and they ran. Quite bloody right, too. Teach them not to snoop.

  He turned and flew east, away from the groping, barking archie, and climbed through the cloud yet again.

  Nothing interesting happened on the way home. He found Pepriac, landed rather more neatly than usual and taxied to the hangars. As usual, Henley seemed to have gone to sleep, but appearances were misleading. Henley was dead. He had a firm grip of his Lewis gun and his eyes were open. He’d been killed by a burst of heavy machine-gun fire that came up through the floor. Dando took four bullets out of his chest.

  Chapter 10

  After ten minutes’ walking along the lane Paxton had done enough saluting for one day. The roads around Pepriac were amazingly busy. He opened the first gate he found and set off across the fields.

  Once, when Paxton first got his commission, saluting had been the greatest fun; he’d walked about town, seeking out private soldiers who must salute him or, if they failed, be reprimanded, which was almost more satisfying. But now, here, with so many units on the march, saluting had become a chore, no more exciting than inspecting the men’s latrines, which he had already done.

  He avoided an infantry camp, went past a silent and apparently deserted Casualty Clearing Station, and paused to examine a large hole, freshly dug, about the size of a tennis court. An experimental trench? Wrong shape. Something to do with latrines, perhaps? Unlikely. Paxton finally decided it was intended to be a swimming pool. He walked on, skirted a wood that was packed with stores, and passed an artillery battalion in camp.

  By now it had stopped raining. The air was warm; steam was rising from the rows of khaki bell-tents. Paxton got a whiff of horse-dung. Somewhere out of sight, a blacksmith was making his anvil ring. A row of guns could be seen, lined up as if ready to fire a salute. Just the sight of them excited Paxton. He could visualize the flash from the muzzle, the recoil, the smoke blowing over the half-naked gunners slinging shells to each other, the distant flowering of an explosion as the enemy’s position disintegrated in flying gobs of blood and mud. What fun! What simply ripping fun!

  He walked on, and was leaning on a gate and thinking how pleased his parents would be when he won a medal (his father was an architect, and Oliver had always pitied him for leading such a dull life) when an elderly major came along. “You weren’t thinking of crossing that field, were you, laddy?” the major said. “You might get your head chopped off if you do.” His manner was distant rather than critical.

  “Chopped off for thinking it, or for doing it, sir?”

  The major lit a pipe and carefully broke the match in two. “You’re Flying Corps, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Try not to be as big a bloody fool on the ground as you are in the sky.”

  “Very good, sir.” Paxton felt too bouncy to be squashed. “Is something about to happen here, sir?”

  “Cavalry charge. Ever seen a cavalry charge? No, of course you haven’t. You were a dribbling infant in 1914.” He pointed with his pipe. “There stands the enemy, that double line of stakes.” They were about six feet high and each had a turnip stuck on top. “Any moment now a detachment of the Third Dragoon Guards will appear to my left. Then watch out.”

  Paxton glanced at him. The major’s chin was thrust forward and his lower lip was twitching with eagerness.

  The cavalry suddenly appeared, cresting a rise that Paxton hadn’t noticed, in a solid-looking column of fours. At first the drumming of hooves was felt as a vibration, then it was heard. The column fanned out and formed two lines abreast, one well behind the other. Now Paxton could see clods of earth sent flying as the gallop began and the drumming was a soft, insistent thunder. Steel flickered along the line. Swords! “Golly!” Paxton said and wished he hadn’t, but the old major was deaf and blind to anything except the Third Dragoon Guards. The first line swept past, tall men on big horses. Swords fell and hacked at the turnips on the poles, the line charged on. “I say!” Paxton said. The second line carried lances. Their targets were the fallen hunks of turnip. As each trooper bore down and thrust he gave a long rising whoop of triumph that did strange things to Paxton’s testicles. “I say!” he said. The drumming faded. “What an absolutely splendid stunt!”

  “That’s what you’d call it, would you? A stunt?” The major carried a crop stuffed down the side of his right boot. He pulled it out and whacked his leg several times. “That stunt, as you call it, is going to cut the German army to ribbons and win this war in half a trice, if only we’re given half a chance.”

  They climbed over the gate and walked to the scene of the charge. The major picked up half a turnip. “That’s what Master Boche will look like after the Dragoon Guards have parted his hair,” he said. “All we need is half a chance.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, sir,” Paxton said daringly,”but aren’t there rather a lot of Huns?”

  “Not just the Dragoons. Life Guards. Royal Horse Guards. Lancers. Hussars.” The major ran out of fingers on his left hand, so he began prodding Paxton in the chest with his crop. “Second Indian Cavalry. That’s the Deccan Horse, Hodson’s Horse, Poona Horse. Canadian Cavalry. My God, man, we could finish the job with half that number. Just given half a chance.” He gave Paxton the half turnip.

  They walked back to the gate. “Pay no attention to me,” the major said. “My impatience gets the better of me sometimes. The way things have been going, you chaps see more action in a week than we do in a year. What?”

  Paxton nodded. “I had a scrap with a Fokker just the other day, sir. Managed to knock him down in the end.”

  “Good for you. Come and have a drink. Meet the chaps.”

  Paxton dropped the half turnip when the major wasn’t looking. “People sometimes call us the cavalry of the skies,” he said. “I must say I think that’s the most enormous compliment we could have, don’t you, sir?”

  The RFC was very efficiently organised to provide replacements. The adjutant phoned the Officers’ Pool at St. Omer and a new observer was delivered by tender to Pepriac in time for tea. He was Canadian and his name was Stubbs. He was built like a heavyweight and he had a face like a baby. Gus Mayo had got permission to go to Amiens to get his hair cut. When he came back he went to his billet and found his batman changing the sheets on Henley’s bed. At the other end of the room Stubbs was playing darts against himself.

  “Hullo!” Mayo said. “Henley gone?”

  “Yes, sir,” the batman said. “Shame, isn’t it?”

  “Oh.” Mayo came to a halt. He watched him smooth out a creased blanket. “Gone for good, you mean.”

  “Funeral’s tomorrow, sir. This is Mr. Stubbs, sir.”

  They shook hands. “You’ll like it here,” Mayo said. “Grand bunch of chaps. I don’t suppose you brought any new gramophone records?”

  “No. Should I have?”

 
“Dougie Goss trod on our one and only ragtime record last night, the silly sod. What about Mr. Goss?” he asked the batman. “Did he get pipped too?”

  “No, sir.”

  Mayo grunted. “Bloody good pilot, Dougie. I just wish he’d watch where he puts his feet. Feel like a drink?”

  The Court of Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of 2533409 Muleteer-Sergeant Harris J., Attached Royal Engineers, During the Night of 4-5 June 1916, While Driving RFC Tender No. 04379 in the Town of Breteuil, adjourned for lunch after two hours, resumed at half-past two and adjourned again at four, the Court (presided over by Colonel Bliss, supported by a major and a captain) having questioned everyone in Hornet Squadron it could lay its hands on and having discovered, in the words of its president, bugger-all.

  That wasn’t what went into the official record. It was what Bliss told Major Cleve-Cutler and Captain Brazier. “Personally I don’t give a toss about Sergeant Harris J.,” the colonel said. “None of this would matter if he hadn’t utterly demolished a double-fronted grocer’s shop. The owner is demanding a fortune in compensation. You know how the general hates grocers.”

  “Look, Bob,” Cleve-Cutler said. “Isn’t it obvious that Rufus Milne’s your man?”

  “The general won’t wear that.”

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t believe squadron commanders go around at night swapping army tenders for mules. It’s simply not the way they behave, in his experience.”

  “Milne was ill.”

  “Well, he doesn’t believe that, either. He’s never heard of someone that age getting stomach cancer. Milne looked perfectly all right the last time he saw him.”

  “And then went off and killed himself?”

  “The general believes Milne died while battling against great odds. He thinks all these stories about Milne are in very poor taste.”

  “Jolly considerate of him.”

  “Rufus is going to get a posthumous medal,” Bliss said. “Probably a bar to his MC. So I need a villain for my villain, not a hero. See you tomorrow.”

  With the arrival of Stubbs, Paxton no longer had the lowest place at dinner; in fact he was now third from the bottom, because Kellaway had returned from hospital. Kellaway had a black eye and some yellowing bruises on his forehead and a little thicket of stitches on his chin, but he seemed cheerful enough, although his eyes sometimes crossed without warning and he had to shake his head vigorously in order to uncross them.

  Paxton was glad to see that Kellaway treated him in a friendly fashion. Evidently there were no hard feelings about the cold-bath treatment. When they had left the mess and were back in their billet, Paxton said: “You won’t believe this, old man, but they’ve refused to credit us with shooting down that Hun.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Captain Piggott.” Kellaway looked puzzled. “Our flight commander, for heaven’s sake,” Paxton said. “And of course the CO backs him up. Isn’t it a rotten shame?”

  “What Hun?” Kellaway asked.

  “The Fokker.” Paxton remembered that Kellaway had seen the enemy plane. “The Albatros, I mean. It crashed. I shot the tail off and it crashed.”

  “I don’t remember. If you say it happened, of course it happened but I don’t remember anything for the last week. I don’t even remember coming here.”

  “Yes, but …” Paxton felt swindled of his kill. “You remember me, don’t you? We left England together.”

  “Dexter?” Kellaway suggested. “No. Wait a minute …”

  O’Neill strolled in, eating an apple. “You want to stay away from the adj,” he said indistinctly. “There’s hell to pay in the men’s latrines … Jeez, you look a sight,” he told Kellaway.

  “What’s wrong with the latrines?” Paxton demanded.

  O’Neill took three swift bites of the apple. “Better ask the adj, hadn’t you? All I know is he wants your blood. Two men locked in a cubicle, not very nice, he’s old-fashioned about that sort of thing, I never saw a man so angry, I’d wait until tomorrow if I was you …” But by then Paxton had grabbed his cap and gone. The adjutant didn’t scare him.

  Within a minute he was back. He came in quietly and didn’t look at the other two, just sat on his bed and flicked through a magazine. He had never reached the latrines. Halfway there he had remembered that the cubicles in the latrines had no doors.

  Beneath his apparent calm all his senses were pounding. O’Neill was chatting to Kellaway but it was a while before Paxton took in the meaning and realised that O’Neill was talking about him. “Personally, I put the peculiar smell down to the constipation,” O’Neill said in that maddeningly flat, unchanging voice of his. “A lot of English people of his sort smell like that. We don’t get it in Australia because Australians invented prunes, did you know that?”

  If Sherborne had taught Paxton nothing else it had taught him self-control. This filthy sneering from O’Neill was painful, but Paxton had a trick which he used to deflect it: he repeated to himself the words of his commission: George, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, Etc … To Our Trusty and well beloved Oliver Arthur David Paxton, Greeting. We reposing especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer …

  “I offered him a pound of Australian prunes,” O’Neill said,”but I think he thought they were extra large suppositories and you know he’s not very big in that department. See these pyjamas?”

  Paxton could not resist looking up. O’Neill was holding a pair of his pyjamas. He could see the monogram, OP.

  “He threw these out,” O’Neill said. “I had ‘em washed in disinfectant, you can hardly tell where the stains were. Piece of advice. Never, ever touch that trunk of his. I don’t know what he’s got in there but he goes insane if anyone touches it.” O’Neill picked up his sponge-bag and went out.

  “I don’t think he likes you,” Kellaway said.

  “I loathe and detest him. He’s foul and disgusting and he steals everything he can lay his hands on. He stole my pyjamas. Wait a minute …” Paxton thought hard. When had he last seen those pyjamas?

  “What was all that gibberish about your trunk?” Kellaway said.

  Paxton, frowning furiously, was searching for his keys. “I had to buy this special padlock just to keep the thieving beggar out,” he said. Kellaway came over to see. The keys turned sweetly. The shackle slid out of the staple. Paxton grunted with relief. “I’ve beaten the blighter,” he said. He raised the lid and it fell to the floor with a crash that made him jump.

  “Hullo!” Kellaway said. “What’s happened now?”

  Paxton picked up the lid and examined it. “Someone’s knocked the pins out of the hinges,” he said. “There’s nothing holding the hinges together.” He put the lid back in place and sat on it. “It shouldn’t be possible, not when it’s shut and locked, but…”

  Kellaway delicately fingered the ends of the stitches on his chin. The cut itched, which was supposed to be a sign that it was healing. “Why don’t you get your own back?” he asked. “Hit him, or something.”

  “I don’t intend to sink to his level. The man’s a cad, I shall treat him as a cad. Sooner or later the message will sink in.”

  “Well,” Kellaway said. “You know best.”

  Next day the weather was lovely and the squadron’s Flying Orders were cancelled. Everyone must be available for the Court of Inquiry.

  This was unpopular, not just because it meant hanging around all day in one’s best uniform but because it made people feel as if they were being treated like schoolboys. “What’s all the fuss?” asked the Canadian, Stubbs. “The guy crashed a tender. Happens all the time.”

  “You don’t understand how generals think,” Foster said. “Planned destruction is one thing. You can have all the massacre and mayhem you like, at the Front. What
they won’t tolerate is accidental death behind the Lines. That upsets them. It’s wasteful. Untidy.”

  “One of us should own up,” Essex said. “Not me, I’ve got an alibi, I was smashing up a hotel in Amiens at the time.”

  After breakfast, Corporal Lacey sought out Paxton and handed him a diary. “I came across this when I was parcelling up Mr. Henley’s belongings,” he said. “I think somebody ought to read it.”

  The diary was the size of a pocketbook, with a scuffed green leather cover. “You think it might have something in it that would embarrass his family?” Paxton asked. He tried to remember what Henley had looked like. Something like a potato. Bland and harmless. “Not much chance of that, is there?”

  “Somebody ought to read it, all the same.”

  “D’you mean you’ve noticed something?”

  “Certainly not. Far be it from me to read the private and confidential papers of a commissioned officer. It’s simply that with the Court of Inquiry in session, nothing should be overlooked, no matter how trivial.” Lacey raised a finger. “Apparently trivial.”

  “I don’t see what the devil the Court of Inquiry has to do with it.” But Paxton opened the diary.

  “June the fourth,” Lacey said.

  Paxton found the page, and read, and grunted, and read on. “Good God,” he said, still reading, while his hand took a tighter grip of the pages. “What a pair of gibbering idiots.”

  “The adjutant is in his office,” Lacey said.

  Paxton showed the diary to the adjutant, who showed it to the CO, who showed it to Colonel Bliss when he arrived to reopen the inquiry.

  Bliss read the entry three times.

  “So,” he said. “This fathead Henley got tight, pinched the keys of the tender from the CO when he wasn’t looking, realised he couldn’t drive, persuaded the other fathead Kellaway to drive, they got into an argument about its horsepower and decided to settle it by seeing how many horses they could swap it for, but what they thought were horses turned out to be mules.”